Master of Petersburg

by J. M. Coetzee

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by J.M. Coetzee

  Title Page

  1. Petersburg

  2. The cemetery

  3. Pavel

  4. The white suit

  5. Maximov

  6. Anna Sergeyevna

  7. Matryona

  8. Ivanov

  9. Nechaev

  10. The shot tower

  11. The walk

  12. Isaev

  13. The disguise

  14. The police

  15. The cellar

  16. The printing press

  17. The poison

  18. The diary

  19. The fires

  20. Stavrogin

  Copyright

  About the Book

  * * *

  In The Master of Petersburg J. M. Coetzee dares to imagine the life of Dostoevsky. Set in 1869, when Dostoevsky was summoned from Germany to St Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, this novel is at once a compelling mystery steeped in the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Russia and a brilliant and courageous meditation on authority and rebellion, art and imagination. Dostoevsky is seen obsessively following his stepson’s ghost, trying to ascertain whether he was a suicide or a murder victim and whether he loved or despised his stepfather.

  About the Author

  * * *

  J.M. Coetzee’s work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Youth, Elizabeth Costello and Disgrace, which won the Booker Prize, making him the first author to have won it twice. In 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  ALSO BY J.M. COETZEE

  Dusklands

  In the Heart of the Country

  Waiting for the Barbarians

  Life & Times of Michael K

  Foe

  White Writing

  Age of Iron

  Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews

  Giving Offense

  Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life

  The Lives of Animals

  Disgrace

  Stranger Shores: Essays 1986–1999

  Youth

  Elizabeth Costello

  Slow Man

  Diary of A Bad Year

  THE MASTER OF PETERSBURG

  J.M. Coetzee

  1

  Petersburg

  October, 1869. A droshky passes slowly down a street in the Haymarket district of St Petersburg. Before a tall tenement building the driver reins in his horse.

  His passenger regards the building dubiously. ‘Are you sure this is the place?’ he asks.

  ‘Sixty-three Svechnoi Street, that’s what you said.’

  The passenger steps out. He is a man in late middle age, bearded and stooped, with a high forehead and heavy eyebrows that lend him an air of sober self-absorption. He wears a dark suit of somewhat démodé cut.

  ‘Wait for me,’ he tells the driver.

  Beneath scarred and peeling exteriors the older houses of the Haymarket still retain some of their original elegance, though most have by now become rooming-houses for clerks and students and working-folk. In the spaces between them, sometimes sharing walls with them, have been erected rickety wooden structures of two or even three storeys, warrens of rooms and cubicles, the homes of the very poorest.

  No. 63, one of the older dwellings, is flanked on both sides by structures of this kind. Indeed, a web of beams and struts crosses its face at mid-level, giving it a hemmed-in look. Birds have nested in the crooks of the reinforcing, and their droppings stain the façade.

  A band of children who have been climbing the struts to lob stones into puddles in the street, then leaping down to retrieve them, pause in their game to inspect the stranger. The three youngest are boys; the fourth, who seems to be their leader, is a girl with fair hair and striking dark eyes.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he calls out. ‘Do any of you know where Anna Sergeyevna Kolenkina lives?’

  The boys make no response, staring at him unyieldingly. But the girl, after a moment, lets fall her stones. ‘Come,’ she says.

  The third floor of No. 63 is a warren of interconnecting rooms giving off from a landing at the head of the stairs. He follows the girl down a dark, hook-shaped passageway that smells of cabbage and boiled beef, past an open washroom, to a grey-painted door which she pushes open.

  They are in a long, low room lit by a single window at head-height. Its gloom is intensified by a heavy brocade on the longest wall. A woman dressed in black rises to face him. She is in her middle thirties; she has the same dark eyes and sculpted eyebrows as the child, but her hair is black.

  ‘Forgive me for coming unannounced,’ he says. ‘My name . . .’ He hesitates. ‘I believe my son has been a lodger of yours.’

  From his valise he takes an object and unwraps the white napkin around it. It is a picture of a boy, a daguerreotype in a silvered frame. ‘Perhaps you recognize him,’ he says. He does not give the picture into her hands.

  ‘It is Pavel Alexandrovich, Mama,’ whispers the child.

  ‘Yes, he stayed with us,’ says the woman. ‘I am very sorry.’ There is an awkward silence. ‘He was a lodger here since April,’ she resumes. ‘His room is as he left it, and all his belongings, except for some things that the police took. Do you want to see?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says hoarsely. ‘If there is rent owed, I am of course responsible.’

  His son’s room, though really only a cubicle partitioned off from the rest of the apartment, has its own entrance as well as a window on to the street. The bed is neatly made up; for the rest, there is a chest of drawers, a small table with a lamp, a chair. At the foot of the bed is a suitcase with the initials P. A. I. embossed on it. He recognizes it: a gift of his to Pavel.

  He crosses to the window and looks out. On the street the droshky is still waiting. ‘Will you do something for me?’ he asks the girl. ‘Will you tell the driver he can go now, and will you pay him?’

  The child takes the money he gives her and leaves.

  ‘I would like to be by myself for a while, if you don’t mind,’ he tells the woman.

  The first thing he does when she has left is to turn back the covers of the bed. The sheets are fresh. He kneels and puts his nose to the pillow; but he can smell nothing but soap and sun. He opens the drawers. They have been emptied.

  He lifts the suitcase on to the bed. Neatly folded on top is a white cotton suit. He presses his forehead to it. Faintly the smell of his son comes to him. He breathes in deeply, again and again, thinking: his ghost, entering me.

  He draws the chair to the window and sits gazing out. Dusk is falling, deepening. The street is empty. Time passes; his thoughts do not move. Pondering, he thinks – that is the word. This heavy head, these heavy eyes: lead settling into the soul.

  The woman, Anna Sergeyevna, and her daughter are having supper, sitting across the table from each other with the lamp between them. They fall silent when he enters.

  ‘You know who I am?’ he says.

  She looks steadily at him, waiting.

  ‘You know, I mean, that I am not Isaev?’

  ‘Yes, we know. We know Pavel’s story.’

  ‘Don’t let me interrupt your meal. Do you mind if I leave the suitcase behind for the time being? I will pay to the end of the month. In fact, let me pay for November too. I would like to keep the room, if it isn’t promised.’

  He gives her the money, twenty roubles.

  ‘You don’t mind if I come now and then in the afternoons? Is there someone at home during the day?’

  She hesitates. A look passes between her and the child. Already, he suspects, she is having seco
nd thoughts. Better if he would take the suitcase away and never come back, so that the story of the dead lodger could be closed and the room freed. She does not want this mournful man in her home, casting darkness all about him. But it is too late, the money has been offered and accepted.

  ‘Matryosha is at home in the afternoons,’ she says quietly. ‘I will give you a key. Could I ask you to use your own entrance? The door between the lodger’s room and this one doesn’t lock, but we don’t normally use it.’

  ‘I am sorry. I didn’t realize.’

  Matryona.

  For an hour he wanders around the familiar streets of the Haymarket quarter. Then he makes his way back across Kokushkin Bridge to the inn where, under the name Isaev, he took a room earlier in the day.

  He is not hungry. Fully dressed, he lies down, folds his arms, and tries to sleep. But his mind goes back to No. 63, to his son’s room. The curtains are open. Moonlight falls on the bed. He is there: he stands by the door, hardly breathing, concentrating his gaze on the chair in the corner, waiting for the darkness to thicken, to turn into another kind of darkness, a darkness of presence. Silently he forms his lips over his son’s name, three times, four times.

  He is trying to cast a spell. But over whom: over a ghost or over himself? He thinks of Orpheus walking backwards step by step, whispering the dead woman’s name, coaxing her out of the entrails of hell; of the wife in graveclothes with the blind, dead eyes following him, holding out limp hands before her like a sleepwalker. No flute, no lyre, just the word, the one word, over and over. When death cuts all other links, there remains still the name. Baptism: the union of a soul with a name, the name it will carry into eternity. Barely breathing, he forms the syllables again: Pavel.

  His head begins to swim. ‘I must go now,’ he whispers or thinks he whispers; ‘I will come back.’

  I will come back: the same promise he made when he took the boy to school for his first term. You will not be abandoned. And abandoned him.

  He is falling asleep. He imagines himself plunging down a long waterfall into a pool, and gives himself over to the plunge.

  2

  The cemetery

  They meet at the ferry. When he sees the flowers Matryona is carrying, he is annoyed. They are small and white and modest. Whether Pavel has a favourite among flowers he does not know, but roses, whatever roses cost in October, roses scarlet as blood, are the least he deserves.

  ‘I thought we could plant it,’ says the woman, reading his thoughts. ‘I brought a trowel. Bird’s-foot: it flowers late.’ And now he sees: the roots are indeed wrapped in a damp cloth.

  They take the little ferryboat to Yelagin Island, which he has not visited in years. But for two old women in black, they are the only passengers. It is a cold, misty day. As they approach, a dog, grey and emaciated, begins to lope up and down the jetty, whining eagerly. The ferryman swings a boathook at it; it retreats to a safe distance. Isle of dogs, he thinks: are there packs of them skulking among the trees, waiting for the mourners to leave before they begin their digging?

  At the gatekeeper’s lodge it is Anna Sergeyevna, whom he still thinks of as the landlady, who goes to ask directions, while he waits outside. Then there is the walk through the avenues of the dead. He has begun to cry. Why now? he thinks, irritated with himself. Yet the tears are welcome in their way, a soft veil of blindness between himself and the world.

  ‘Here, Mama!’ calls Matryona.

  They are before one mound of earth among many mounds with cross-shaped stakes plunged into them bearing shingles with painted numbers. He tries to close his mind to this one number, his number, but not before he has seen the 7s and the 4s and has thought: Never can I bet on the seven again.

  This is the moment at which he ought to fall on the grave. But it is all too sudden, this particular bed of earth is too strange, he cannot find any feeling for it in his heart. He mistrusts, too, the chain of indifferent hands through which his son’s limbs must have passed while he was still in Dresden, ignorant as a sheep. From the boy who still lives in his memory to the name on the death certificate to the number on the stake he is not yet prepared to accept the train of fatality. Provisional, he thinks: there are no final numbers, all are provisional, otherwise the play would come to an end. In a while the wheel will roll, the numbers will start moving, and all will be well again.

  The mound has the volume and even the shape of a recumbent body. It is, in fact, nothing more or less than the volume of fresh earth displaced by a wooden chest with a tall young man inside it. There is something in this that does not bear thinking about, that he thrusts away from him. Taking the place of the thought are galling memories of what he was doing in Dresden all the time that, here in Petersburg, the procedure of storing, numbering, encasing, transporting, burying was following its indifferent course. Why was there no breath of a presentiment in the Dresden air? Must multitudes perish before the heavens will tremble?

  Among images that return is one of himself in the bathroom of the apartment on Larchenstrasse, trimming his beard in the mirror. The brass taps on the washbasin gleam; the face in the mirror, absorbed in its task, is the face of a stranger from the past. Already I was old, he thinks. Sentence had been pronounced; and the letter of sentence, addressed to me, was on its way, passing from hand to hand, only I did not know it. The joy of your life is over: that is what the sentence said.

  The landlady is scraping a small hole at the foot of the mound. ‘Please,’ he says, and gestures, and she moves aside.

  Unbuttoning his coat, unbuttoning his jacket, he kneels, then pitches awkwardly forward till he lies flat upon the mound, his arms extended over his head. He is crying freely, his nose is streaming. He rubs his face in the wet earth, burrows his face into it.

  When he gets up there is soil in his beard, in his hair, in his eyebrows. The child, to whom he has paid no attention, stares with wondering eyes. He brushes his face, blows his nose, buttons his clothes. What a Jewish performance! he thinks. But let her see! Let her see one is not made of stone! Let her see there are no bounds!

  Something flashes from his eyes toward her; she turns away in confusion and presses against her mother. Back to the nest! A terrible malice streams out of him toward the living, and most of all toward living children. If there were a newborn babe here at this moment, he would pluck it from its mother’s arms and dash it against a rock. Herod, he thinks: now I understand Herod! Let breeding come to an end!

  He turns his back on the pair of them and walks off. Soon he has left behind the newer quarter of the graveyard and is roaming among the old stones, among the long-dead.

  When he returns the bird’s-foot has been planted.

  ‘Who is going to take care of it?’ he asks sullenly.

  She shrugs. The question is not for her to answer. It is his turn now, it is for him to say: I will come every day to tend it, or to say: God will take care of it, or else to say: No one is going to take care of it, it will die, let it die.

  The little white flowers toss cheerfully in the breeze.

  He grips the woman’s arm. ‘He is not here, he is not dead,’ he says, his voice cracking.

  ‘No, of course he is not dead, Fyodor Mikhailovich.’ She is matter-of-fact, reassuring. More than that: she is, at this moment, motherly, not only toward her daughter but toward Pavel too.

  Her hands are small, her fingers slim and rather childish, yet her figure is full. Absurdly, he would like to lay his head on her breast and feel those fingers stroke his hair.

  The innocence of hands, ever-renewed. A memory comes back to him: the touch of a hand, intimate in the dark. But whose hand? Hands emerging like animals, without shame, without memory, into the light of day.

  ‘I must make a note of the number,’ he says, avoiding her eyes.

  ‘I have the number.’

  Where does his desire come from? It is acute, fiery: he wants to take this woman by the arm, drag her behind the gatekeeper’s hut, lift her dress, couple with her. />
  He thinks of mourners at a wake falling on the food and drink. A kind of exultation in it, a brag flung in the face of death: Us you do not have!

  They are back at the jetty. The grey dog slinks cautiously up to them. Matryona wants to stroke it but her mother discourages her. There is something wrong with the dog: an open, angry sore runs up its back from the base of its tail. It whimpers softly all the time, or else drops suddenly on its hindquarters and attacks the sore with its teeth.

  I will come again tomorrow, he promises: I will come alone, and you and I will speak. In the thought of returning, of crossing the river, finding his way to his son’s bed, being alone with him in the mist, there is a muted promise of adventure.

  3

  Pavel

  He sits in his son’s room with the white suit on his lap, breathing softly, trying to lose himself, trying to evoke a spirit that can surely not yet have left these surroundings.

  Time passes. From the next room, through the partition, come the hushed voices of the woman and child and the sounds of a table being laid. He puts the suit aside, taps on the door. The voices cease abruptly. He enters. ‘I will be leaving now,’ he says.

  ‘As you can see, we are about to have supper. You are welcome to join us.’

  The food she offers is simple: soup, and potatoes with salt and butter.

  ‘How did my son come to lodge with you?’ he asks at a certain point. Still he is careful to call him my son: if he brings forth the name he will begin to shake.

  She hesitates, and he understands why. She could say: He was a nice young man; we took to him. But was is the obstacle, the boulder in her path. Until there is a way of circumventing the word in all its starkness, she will not speak it in front of him.

  ‘A previous lodger recommended him,’ she says at last. And that is that.

  She strikes him as dry, dry as a butterfly’s wing. As if between her skin and her petticoat, between her skin and the black stockings she no doubt wears, there is a film of fine white ash, so that, loosened from her shoulders, her clothes would slip to the floor without any coaxing.